


Until the Lights Burn Out

by Loracine



Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M, M/M, SCIFI AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-12
Updated: 2017-09-23
Packaged: 2018-08-30 13:49:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 19,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8535589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Loracine/pseuds/Loracine
Summary: Castiel has been hiding from himself for a very long time. Each time he drops a convict off at the nearest lockdown he tells himself that they deserve it, even though the idea of a fair trial died out centuries ago. He ignores the guilt he feels when he finds a suitable vessel among the damned, when he bribes the guards to purchase it, and when he's walking away from his former bretheren laden down with credits while the vessel is led away to be hollowed out for use. They deserve it. He deserves it.Meg, his first mate and epic pain in the ass only friend, has been searching for a Nazp'sad (a human vessel capable of a true bonding) without his knowledge. She is convinced that the right one will pull her Captain out of his decades long funk.But, when they finally find Dean will he still be worth all the trouble?





	1. 1: Way Down We Go

**Author's Note:**

> Updates will be slow.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean tilted his face towards the ceiling and sniffed, not bothering to open his eyes. There were only two instances in a prisoner's life that offered a chance to see sunlight. One of those included an all-expense paid trip to the surface, away from these rough rock walls and narrow spaces. He could walk out in the open, where anyone could step out of the shadows and stab him in the back. One two hits and sluggish leaking black from between his ribs. The Cerberon star was a sickly orange-green ball of yuck anyways. It wouldn't be worth the half minute or so of freedom he would have before the toxic atmospheric gasses killed him. There were more interesting ways to die. Too bad he'd seen most of those too.

  _You let your feet run wild  
__Time has come as we all oh, go down  
__Yeah but for the fall oh, my  
__Do you dare to look him right in the eyes?_

_Cause they will run you down, down til the dark_  
_Yes and they will run you down, down til you fall_  
_And they will run you down, down til you go_  
_Yeah so you can't crawl no more_

~+~ 

**Kova'R Exchange Station**

Castiel was lost in a cloud of rostek smoke, senses pinging. A long curling shkya tongue, wet and warm, left a tingling track down between his shoulder blades, delicate fingers threading through the small black feathers at the base of his wings. He groaned, his back bowing. The shkya in front of him latched her mouth onto the flesh of his chest and trilled as she worked her way down. Their species rarely produced multiple births and he'd been unable to resist the rarity of twins.

"Danha, get over here," he directed the only human in the room and watched as she slunk across the silk sheets, pupils blown wide, to join her companions in licking a path down his body.

Just when they were getting to the good parts, Castiel's moans muffled in the moist folds between the human woman's legs, the door whooshed open. "Babycakes, don't you think three days is quite long enough for one binge," Meg's bored tone broke through the fog. He felt the woman's hesitation at Meg's bizarre appearance before she went back to work on him. Members of Meg's species weren't a common sight, so rare that they were known only as demons. Their homeworld was as yet undiscovered and not one hint of their civilization had been found in any of the known ruins of their galaxy. Not even Castiel knew if they all possessed that same deep bottomless black hue to their skin as Meg or if she’d just been born lucky. She wore it well. If their respective reproductive bodily fluids weren't poisonous to each other, Castiel suspected he and Meg would have given it at least one go before now. She was beautiful.

He threw a pillow in her general direction, missing by a mile. "Go away," he growled, feathers fluffing in irritation.

She walked closer, the door snicking closed behind her. "No can do, Cassie. Kova picked up a new warrant, gave me first refusal. A human. We'll be dropping the poor bastard into The Pit," she prodded. The Pit was a supermax lockdown for the worst of the worst. Those facilities always paid well and they paid in credits upon delivery too, no waiting for the deposit to clear the galactic banknet exchange. He felt one corner of the soft platform bed dip with her weight.

The human gasped when the male shyka fit his mouth around her tiny pleasure button and applied suction, tongue flicking.

Meg scratched her sharp talons lightly upon the sole of Castiel’s foot, causing that entire leg to twitch. There was no way she was about to allow him to pass up on the job in favor of a little more time with his two favorite vices, rostek and willing flesh.

"Ten minutes," he countered. The feminine shkya enveloped the flared head of his genitals in between her lips and he tipped his head back in distraction. "Make that twenty," he rumbled and firmly pushed forward with his hips. He could always hire these danha again next time the Croatoan passed nearby. For a shkya she was talented with those tentacles of hers, he thought as she proceeded to use them on just about every erogenous zone he possessed. The three of them worked well as a team.

Meg snorted and fit the nozzle of the rostek mister over his face.

He breathed in deeply, gasping with every tug between his legs.

"You have fifteen, and then I'm dragging your feathery ass outta here, dressed or not," she informed him coolly.

He pulled the contraption away from his mouth just long enough to tell her, "You're the best," with a dopey grin.

"Back at'cha, sweet cheeks," she threw over her shoulder as she left.

Fifteen minutes later, thereabouts, he was stumbling out of the room. Clouds of sweet smelling rostek followed him out into the corridor like it knew he was reluctant to depart. The visit had done what he needed it to, though, by the bare minimum. Castiel had a spring in his step now, and it was becoming more and more obvious as the calming influence of the chemicals in his blood slowly began to wane. He'd refused the antidote, preferring to let the drug's effects linger in his body rather than take the easy route to sobriety. He just wished the dhana were coming with him as well. His hair was hopelessly mussed, his feathers were in disarray, and he had to valiantly tug at his rumpled clothing if he had any hope of righting them before he stepped onto the Croatoan. He looked like a mobile disaster zone and he knew it. They'd done quite a number on him, a combination of effort and real talent. Someone had gone to the trouble of providing a little F'hoarg training in the stables since he'd last sampled the goods here.

Castiel ran the tips of his fingers along the cool metal of the bulkhead as he passed from the outer airlock to the interior of his ship. The Croatoan was a small vessel, barely big enough to house himself, Meg, and one prisoner, two if it came to that. The galley was no bigger than his closet with a quick heat box for the ration meals he kept in the tiny cargo hold. He’d picked her up a few decades back in a card game and intended to unload it onto the first junker he could find. She’d proven versatile, though. Meg had once complained about his inability to form attachments. Now that he'd proven her wrong by growing fond of the Croatoan, his demon copilot was complaining about his perplexing affection for this diminutive hunk of junk instead, with admittedly beautiful lines and a kickass propulsion system.

"Go take a shower, pretty bird. You are a mess," Meg told him over testily over the intercom. Great, she must have turned on the security feeds. "We leave in ten."

Castiel considered the many ways in which he could dispose of her body as he obeyed.

"And grab me a klah on the way up here," she added.

He flipped her off.

A shower in less than five minutes was not a shower. A quick glance at the sonic jets, maybe, but he was far from clean. He’d managed to get the majority of his skin scrubbed. Castiel's wings, though, required special treatment. The feathers were still damp with various bodily fluids and even he was repulsed by the stench clinging to him now that his head had cleared a bit. Revenge. His copilot possessed an even keener sense of smell than he could boast. He grinned as he stepped into the cramped cockpit. Oh, sweet revenge.

She noticed it as he'd palmed the cockpit door open. Meg's face scrunched up, facial ridges coloring in disgust. "Danga's swinging balls, Cassie," she exclaimed.

He did his best to look oblivious.

She smacked him on the shoulder, looked at her palm like she'd just dipped it in bog water, and then wiped her hand off on her pants. "Seriously. I thought I told you to wash off, pretty bird," she grouched as her fingers began to take the onboard computer through the checklist. The Croatoan's twin engines began to rumble and then flared to life. "Where's my klah," she huffed.

Castiel shrugged and keyed his mic, a smirk pulling at the edges of his mouth when she smacked him on the shoulder and rescued the klah pouch from his grip. "Croatoan, hatch 4-17, requesting disembark," he said. He could force the hatch to release his ship through the emergency protocols, but he had no intention of alienating Vax Kova or his staff. Operating in this sector would be tricky without access to the repair bays and resupply merchants on the station, not to mention the pleasure suites. The next decent brothel was nearly a week's journey away in an entirely different sector.

A digital voice gave him the standard reply, "4-17 cleared." There was a mechanical clunk and they were nudged free of the docking collar. A pop sounded as each of his ship's three umbilicals released and retracted.

Castiel watched his indicator lights switch to red ready and placed his hand on the control gel when the last one lit up. The star system quickly winked out of existence as the engines at his back hummed along happily. The Croatoan achieved maximum cruising velocity in under fifteen minutes.

~+~ 

**Je Brapu, Class L Planet**

 

This was a lousy planet with extra awesome gravity, meaning Castiel would have to haul one point three seven the weight of anything he put on his back, and enough blue dust swirling in the air to induce a nasty case of pneumoconiosis in days and not decades. The planet had been renamed after the Je Brapu mining consortium sometime in the last decade, appropriate since mining was the only industry which seemed to be able to stick it out on the cursed rocky landscape. He peered out at the swirling dirty landscape with a sigh. He was not looking forward to donning the hazard gear. But since Meg had handled the last field mission, she'd been clear in her refusal to do it for the second time in a row. Certainly not out into the crap waiting on the other side of the hatch.

"You about ready," his copilot inquired from the doorway.

Castiel gave the HUD controls one last caress before he stood. "As long as you are finished placing optics with the drone," he reminded her.

She snickered, "Would I forget to do that? Wait, don't answer that." She plopped her pitch black self in the plush crew chair and the glass lit up with vid feeds automatically. "Go don your dress, Cinderella. This guy isn't going to stay put for long," she told him.

Castiel had dried out on the journey here, mostly. He made it a point not to indulge while on the job. The fast turn around had given him a nasty headache. He had seriously earned that relaxation time and it had been interrupted. To his chagrin, there was still a bit of leftover burn he hadn't been able to work off. He wouldn't get the chance to indulge in his baser urges for a while longer and he resisted the urge to blame Meg. All he had to do was catch this asshole and he was golden, riding the waves. So, there he was a half hour later, walking down the center of a bustling mid-week market and covered head to toe in his custom Class II hazard gear instead of chewing out the demon like he really wanted to. She had the habit of becoming a vindictive bitch if he pushed too hard on certain subjects. Paying jobs topped her list. It was smarter if he just folded and played along.

"Remind me again why I put up with you," he asked over the comm unit. He owned the Croatoan outright. Technically he didn't need her specifically. He could drop her off at the nearest trade exchange and hire someone a bit more amenable to live with.

Her cheeky reply came over the airwaves a little staticky, "You keep me around for my sparkling personality. Face it, Cassie, you'd get bored. Spied our wayward birdie yet?"

"No," he huffed and tried to ignore the hostility coming from the crowd in waves.

"Angel," a group of people hissed low, giving him a wide berth out of fear, not respect. They were herding their children from view like he was some kid-eating monster. His kind was not welcome on most of the planets in this sector. If this kept up he would be forced to hunt down an off-worlder just to confirm the name of the settlement. These type of places were so nomadic that if he came back in a few weeks all he would find would be bare rock and rolling dust bushes. The people followed the scattered deposits across the landscape, eeking out a living on the barren wasteland. For all Castiel knew, his mark might be on the other side of the planet.

Castiel tried not to roll his eyes as another woman hissed, "Angel," as he passed, her voice full of vitriolic contempt.

"I see you've made an impression on the locals," Meg snickered.

He would have loved to pass as a human. It would have made days like these so much easier. He could walk like one, talk like one, his reproductive organs were of the same general shape as that of a human male. He was not a man at all, though, and he could never pretend otherwise, not with the two massive feathered appendages stretching out his shoulder blades. There were ways to conceal wings. For instance, they could be folded under a bulky false pack. It was damned tricky to hide his own twelve-foot wingspan, impressive for his kind, even in the bulky suit he was wearing, though. The muscle cramps, let alone the hassle of modifying the equipment, simply weren't worth it. He had opted instead for comfort. Damned the haters. His Nephil model Class II suit encased each of his wings in its own sleeve, allowing for a good range of movement in his joints. The suit allowed him to work field excursions for much longer, shaving massive amounts of time off every job they took. It did nothing to hide his species, though. F'hoarg. Angel. Hated. He had found it amusing that the humans had chosen to insult his species using a name that had once stood for humanity's most revered mythical protectors, servants of their one god. The fact that it had actually caught on and still served as the most common racial slur for his own kind was almost comical, despite the physical resemblance, and he wore that supposed smear with defiant pride.

"You'd think they'd change it up a bit," Meg remarked dryly. She was hooked into his helmet, seeing and hearing what he was experiencing through the live feed on her vid screen. "The least they could do is make it interesting."

He grunted in agreement and offered them nothing of his attention. "Did you load the stim packs," he asked over the comm instead.

She chuckled, "Need a pick me up?"

It was too bad she couldn't see his face. "I may need something to mellow me out, Meg," he informed her. Not much could effect a F'hoarg constitution. The usual options like caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol barely tickled his robust system. Castiel's body simply eliminated the mild chemicals too fast for him to feel any of it before it was on the way out, useless. So, he bought military-grade combat packs. Stims to bring him up and fend off a fatigue crash, indefinitely if needed. Quells to settle him back down, ease the shakes of withdrawal. It wasn't the quality he'd been used to, the cocktails that had hooked him in the service, but they did the job well enough and he hadn't found a way to come off of them entirely yet.

There was a pause and then she said, "Blue button, Cassie. Red for the burst to bring you back up. You've got three of each. Try not to get so stoned you can't even aim your stunner."

His wings drooped in embarrassment as he remembered the one time he had overdone it on the downers and had completely forgotten his comm bud and the identity of their target. He'd played a round of bezique with the guy, ended up losing and buying him a ticket off-world. Then he'd waved at him like they were best buds as he boarded the transport. Meg had found Castiel hours later, finally coming back up from that psychedelic trip, and she'd used it as a cautionary tale ever since. That whole day was still embarrassing to remember. Meg hadn't let him out on a job without monitoring his every move ever since. "It happened once, just once. I didn't know my limits with rostek back then," he complained and mentally added that the array of other drugs floating around his body at the time had probably been more to blame than his own faulty judgment. "I don't see him," he added as he scanned the market, more as a change of topic than anything else.

"You didn't think he'd be mingling with the natives," she remarked.

Castiel growled in frustration "Check the feeds." Several people that had strayed close enough to hear him through the helmet scurried away. Well, there went any hope of local assistance. Figures.

In the entirely too early hours of the morning, Meg had gone ahead and peppered the small outpost with the miniature remote optics. He hadn't been over his sulking at the time, choosing to watch her on the overhead display and attempt his unique brand of humor that only made her laugh because of how monumentally terrible he was at it. Now, he was regretting not getting up off his butt and helping out. He could have doubled the number of feeds available, and maybe even widened the search grid so he didn't have to do so much walking today.

"Check 'em yourself, feathers," she snapped back and he knew she'd left the room by the sound the door made as it closed behind her.

"Tell me again why we took this job," he grumbled.

"We haven't searched The Pit in eight years, princess," Meg snapped.

He snorted and kept walking. This dusty little mining colony must have been recently conceived when the war ignited, prefab habitats desperately clinging to bare rock while the orbital bombardment raged overhead. He imagined that, despite its corporate sponsorship, the colonists had suffered more than most when the shipping lines had gotten dicey and the freight captains had started refusing contracts. Supply lines had dried up across the board. He would know. He had been in charge of the anti-freight operation for a short time, starving the willful into submission. It hadn't worked quite like they'd planned. Angels were rare in these parts for a good reason, the sane ones anyway. Castiel was just glad he'd always been a bit camera shy. If the heckling was uncomfortable now, he didn't want to find out just how violent it would get if they knew he'd been responsible for the massacre of hundreds of freighter crews and the food shortages that had caused the deaths countless innocent civilians during the war.

By the height of the day he was hauling a recalcitrant convict back through the market. It was still teeming with activity, crowds flinching away from the spitting vulgar man as he was bodily dragged towards the spaceport. Castiel cuffed him on the back of the head when he groped a passing human. The person gave an indignant squawk but didn't stick around long enough for him to identify the gender. "That was not nice," Castiel admonished.

The convict, a scumbag wanted for a variety of offenses including sexual assault, was grinning from ear to ear. "Gotta get my kicks where I can, mate. Where I'm goin', won't get no more chances. Ain't that right?"

Castiel grunted. The Pit was a cryo supermax. Once he got his cut of the bounty, the assbutt would be spending the rest of his life in a medically induced coma enjoying the finest social reprogramming technology could offer. He couldn't even dredge up an ounce of sympathy for him, either. After what he'd read about this little midget of a man, Castiel had almost hoped he was a good candidate for the inoas modifications, a collection of medications and implants that had recently replaced the once natural process of bonding human to f'hoarg. There were three new tears in his freshly repaired enviro hazard suit. The little fatherless child had put three rips in his suit and quite a few scuff marks on the outer fabric before he'd been subdued. Repairing a suit like that wasn't going to be cheap and purchasing a replacement would be problematic. Even if he bought one off the rack, a brand new suit had little chance of successfully fitting his unusually large wings. He would have to get it modified by a level three suit engineer at home.

Castiel shuddered at the thought. After what he'd done he would be lucky if all the ruling class did was put him through a little re-education. They would wipe him clean and leave nothing behind except for blind obedience to the regime, but it would leave him alive and his base personality relatively intact. There were far more grievous fates available to him, fodder for Castiel's worst nightmares. No, he would never see Paradise again. He would never walk upon the Alabaster Shore or sip Red Ambrosia made from arvas lilies that only grew along the highest mountains of Arcadia.

"Secure the hatch," he called out as they stepped through the airlock and into the Croatoan. It thumped shut behind him and he waited until he heard the locks engage before he moved further into the bowels of the ship.

"So, you gotta smoke," the prisoner asked, grabbing the bars of the narrow box Castiel had locked him in, standing room only. He'd be in there for the duration of the trip. There were days he liked to think that he was doing them a favor, giving them a taste of the rest of their lives.

"Yes," he replied and stalked off to remove the suit.

Meg paid him a visit while he was scowling at the damage to the specialized fabric. She whistled. "Damn, the warrant wasn't kidding," she remarked. She put her finger through one of the larger tears, claws carefully scraping the inner lining delicately. "We'll have to drop by a rooted world to get that repaired. You should be more careful next time," she added with a smirk.

Castiel frowned. "I would rather not," he told her. A rooted world had established settlements, technology, money, and undoubtedly it would also boast a f'hoarg contingent of some sort.

She cuffed him on the shoulder. "Oh come on. Live a little. You know I've got your back, pretty bird," she reminded him. "Besides, do you have any idea how long it's been since I've had a proper manicure? I mean, look at these things," she exclaimed with mock hurt, displaying her sharp claws.

He shrugged and finished stepping out of the suit. "We drop off the prisoner first and then you can blow your share on Nimirian dental worms and nimshi mud bakes," he agreed.

"Excellent," Meg chirped. "Get squared away. Lift off is in fifteen."

Castiel nodded and spent the majority of the time rinsing the grime off his body. He even put his wings through the ionic curtain to clean the feathers. He'd preen them later, but it felt heavenly just to finally be free of the gunk sticking to him. The prisoner, however, failed to adhere to instructions to remain quiet for the duration of the trip. His indignant complaining about the lack of amenities in his accommodations kept them both up until sheer exhaustion sucked Castiel under into sleep.

~+~

**The Pit, Cerberon IV, Class Y Planet**

Dean tilted his face towards the ceiling and sniffed, not bothering to open his eyes. There were only two instances in a prisoner's life that offered a chance to see sunlight. One of those included an all-expense paid trip to the surface, away from these rough rock walls and narrow spaces. He could walk out in the open, where anyone could step out of the shadows and stab him in the back. One two hits and sluggish leaking black from between his ribs. The Cerberon star was a sickly orange-green ball of yuck anyways. It wouldn't be worth the half minute or so of freedom he would have before the toxic atmospheric gasses killed him. There were more interesting ways to die. Too bad he'd seen most of those too.

A loud clanging alarm shuddered down the dim tunnels and Dean considered for one brief moment of sanity not to answer the dinner bell. The guards had singled him out pretty quickly in the beginning; when he was fresh-faced, wide-eyed, and still reeling with the shock of getting snatched from his bed and hauled out to the ass end of nowhere only to find out he was getting left behind. He'd been too trusting then, figured they'd take him out, bullet to the brain pan, not leave him to rot in this hellhole. He could starve to death, waste away and curl up like those skeletons in section twelve. He would have a hell of a time as a ghost rattling his chains. He didn't, though. Dean picked himself up off the floor. If he'd counted the days right he'd be eating good, fucking gourmet rations up top in the tower with the piggies.

Cell doors slammed shut along the promenade faster than a virgin on her wedding night. Panic had an acrid stench that burned his nose hairs. He sneezed and vaulted off the walkway. Seven four was giving him the stink eye from the pit as he dropped down, metal links in his hands snapping tight and keeping him aloft with a yank on his shoulders. In another life, on a better day, he would have feared the height. Death had meant something then. There had been something to lose. Now he glided as the hellhounds ran down their prey, jaws snapping. The crunch of bone was a soundtrack now, no longer relegated to his nightmares. He landed, feet and hands, on the railing a few levels from the ground dust of the shaft floor. Glinting green eyes were inches from the polished hide of a hound and anyone else would have made peace with their god while they could. Dean curled his lip in a snarl and caught its gaze in his own. Had the thing backing down to its belly in no time, whining like a cur. He'd never admit that he gave it an apologetic scratch behind the ear, a pat on its side when he left it to continue the hunt. They both still had to eat today.

Three nine five had a twisted ankle, hobbling along. Poor bastard wasn't gonna make it. Not after Dean's spoon, sharpened to a point, carved out his innards as an appetizer. Dimwit had been pissing upwind of Dean's cell since he couldn't care when and the two things he liked even less than fear was shit and piss. The kid shoulda crawled outta the block if it hurt so bad to walk. Bad form. Shoulda used better manners, or caught someone on a good day to teach him some. Dean thought he saw one of the hellhounds smile at him, blood-soaked grin broad and affectionate. Big babies. Another spurting body crumpled beneath bunched muscle and jagged teeth with a scream and Dean howled with the hounds. The beasts ate like clumsy infants too, liquid splashing from their dinner in red arcs and he couldn't help but grin when they started hopping in the clotting puddles with their big paws.

~+~

**Purga Sector, Croatoan**

A bass alarm, loud enough to wake the dead, yanked Castiel from his slumber. The sound file had previously contained a shrill klaxon call that had threatened to burst his eardrums until he'd replaced it with something a bit more bearable. Meg had exhibited far too much glee in using it, so he'd replaced the file with one of an old Earth foghorn back when Earth was still habitable and the main method of product transport had been the water shipping lanes. His current choice was not any less annoying but it did have the benefit of leaving his hearing largely functional. He uncurled from the modified perch of his bed and plodded down the short hallway to the bridge.

"Meg, don't tell me you need a klah break," he complained.

She chuckled, the sound a high twitter that clashed with her fierce personality. It had taken almost a decade working side by side with the demon for her to relax enough to laugh in his presence.

The uniquely orange-green glow of the Cerberon star explained it all. He settled into his captain's seat with a groan and stubbornly peered out at the slowly growing ball of gas. "We are still two hours out," Castiel grumbled.

"That'll be just enough time to shake the sleep out of your hair," she pointed out and shooed him back to his cabin.

The Pit had been constructed with f'hoarg technology before the war. Human ingenuity had kept it running after his kind had pulled out, the legions retreating behind their blessed curtain. It had been intended as an izizop housing facility, a massive freezer where idle assets could be left on ice until needed. Humanity had proven difficult to manage, to control, or contain; more so than his superiors had anticipated. For such delicate bodies, they were a hardy people with a stubborn streak an astronomical unit wide. The species' cussedness was something he grudgingly admired. In this case, it left one highly advanced storage facility in the hands of human bureaucracy, inept hands. If they had asked him, he would have set the charges and let the plaskrete blow the place to smithereens.

He listened to Meg announce their presence and request a hanger. The surface of Cerberon IV was deadly to a fragile body and detrimental to the exterior of the facility. He scowled at the deeply furrowed scars and peppered dents marring the once flawless hull. It had once glowed a luminescent blue so pale it could have been white. The hanger they were directed to maintained some of that beauty and he knew that the halls would as well. There were over three hundred prisoners housed inside, but not one of them would ever wake again. Without the benefits of the inoas program modifications they would continue to age, stuck in cryo until the ravages of old age took them down into death. The scientists had claimed that a person interred in cryo experienced a dreamless sleep, just a tumble into oblivion, but Castiel and the other rare empaths of his race knew differently. The moment the Croatoan drew close enough the clamor of the prisoners' emotions began battering at his mental shields.

The engines growled one last time before they went silent and Meg was humming as she flipped the switches to lock the pilot and ready the ship for a quick breakaway if the situation called for it. "Quit your brooding, Castiel," she chided. "You go fetch our payday and I'll start the sweep. And, don't forget the scotch!"

The prisoner was mouthy as ever, but he was finally showing a bit of unease now that he was being marched down the ivory corridors of The Pit. "I've got this nice stash of Galta gin. Twelve cases. I-It's not too late," he stammered as they approached the booking station.

"Name," the guard inquired, not looking up from his screen.

"Castiel of the Croatoan," he stated and handed over the ident chip listing his permit and the warrant for his prisoner.

The guard sniffed. "Second door on your right for payment," he said and gave the chip back. It was then that he looked up and visibly recoiled when he saw the wings on Castiel's back.

Castiel left the prisoner to his fate and did as he was told. The prison administrator was waiting for him by the door. His face split into a wide grin that was disturbingly predatory. "Castiel! It's been a while. I see you've brought us another unfortunate soul," he said merrily.

This was the sort of company man that made Castiel's life possible. He and Meg weren't just in the bounty hunting business. The bounty garnered off the occasional escaped convict wouldn't be enough to pay their bills, even if they started cutting corners yesterday. These cryo lockups were just too good at containing the prisoner population to make it a full-time occupation. Because of this, most bounty hunters went the fortune fighter route, or what the F'hoarg called sell-swords. Some even did a little pirating on the side. Castiel sometimes wished he could say he was better than that. It hadn't been his idea to take up life as a slaver, but he was damned good at it. He didn't sell just anyone. He sold humans and he didn't sell just any human, either. Meg had turned out to be extremely talented at sniffing out a certain set of genes that made a human useful to the f'hoarg, an izizop. In the common tongue, the word would be vessel, though the term had lost much of its meaning in the translation. Castiel had come up with the idea to search the max and supermax lockups for viable izizop and purchase them directly from the guards when possible, with or without a little extra convincing to grease the wheels. There had been a time or two that he'd stolen a prisoner, cryo tank and all, when he'd been denied. He wasn't proud of his chosen profession, but it paid the bills and no one really cared what happened to the lifer convicts anyways. If his current catch had been a candidate he would have flown straight to the markets instead.

"Administrator Huxley," Castiel acknowledged, handing over a bottle of Bosian Sipping-Scotch. "There's a new man on the door," he observed.

He nodded and stashed the alcohol out of sight. "Ah, yes. It's hard to keep good help all the way out here. Your girl is looking over our stock now," Huxley told him. He picked up a remote and turned on the security feeds for booking.

Castiel watched as the prisoner was processed with little fuss. It was like now that they were at the heart of Hell that he knew there was nowhere else to go. The bounty collection went just as textbook smooth. After submitting a few biomarkers and inputting his permit number, Castiel had a nice bag of credit bars slung over one shoulder.

"You know, I never could figure out how you pick 'em," Huxley mused, sitting down behind his desk.

Castiel arched a brow at him, his wings thankfully motionless at his back.

"If you let me know what you have in mind for next time, I can set a few aside to look at. Maybe even let you know when you can swing by," he prodded.

"And perhaps bring you more scotch," he added with a smirk.

Huxley let out a short booming laugh, "What can I say, my friend. It's been too long and I have no idea where you get this stuff. Nine years and I haven't found it yet."

"Breaker breaker," Meg suddenly broke the silence on their comm channel.

Castiel straightened and tapped the mic.

"We have hit pay dirt, pretty bird," she announced. "Check your HUD."

Huxley perked up, interested in the sudden change in his stance. "Found something you like," he asked.

An icon was blinking at one corner of the display on his personal HUD. "That one already bears a marker, Meg," he growled with displeasure. "He will be useless."

"Look who marked him," she countered.

Castiel took another look at the readings. No, it couldn't be. The bottom dropped out from beneath him. It couldn't be. He'd never…

"There's no trace of Grace. The serum was never administered," Meg said, telling him what he could already see in the readings and completely oblivious to the minor freak-out he was having. "Name's… umm… Jensen Ackles," she muttered.

He collected himself, drawing a deep breath. "Mark the pod," he ordered and finally turned to Huxley to begin negotiations.

The prison administrator relinquished Jensen in exchange for a quarter of the bounty he'd just collected and a promise to send a full case of scotch with the next supply boat. It was more than he'd ever paid for an izizop, but this was no mere vessel. Castiel didn't know why he felt that way, but leaving the prisoner behind simply had not been an option.

"You know," the portly Huxley was saying as they approached the cryo pod. "I've been working here for twenty years. Never seen anythin' like it. 'Bout four years ago he just popped up on the computer, no intake records. The maintenance stipend is from a private account, arrives every month without fail. Been here ever since. I ain't one to pull the plug just cause we're heavy one guy, 'specially when he's paid for. I figured one day someone would come lookin' for 'im. Might as well be you," he rambled.

He hummed, unsure what he could say. He didn't have a right to be angry at the callous way the man was just handing over another human to slavery, not when Castiel would normally be doing the exact same thing in a few days. The cryo-pod was a gleaming cylinder of ivory and silver, as beautiful as the day it had rolled off the assembly line. Huxley pressed a few buttons and revealed a control pad that was glowing a soft blue. The f'hoarg had a thing for blue. It was soothing. The seals hissed as the temperature was brought up rapidly, pale skin of the human inside turning an angry pink color at the insult. Castiel looked down at the unconscious man and knew that this one wasn't going to be sold to the f'hoarg. He wasn't going to be sold to anyone.

Huxley punched the control panel back into the wall and it engaged with a click. "He'll be up and moving in no time," he stated.

Castiel knew better, though. A rapid resuscitation after years in cryo was not going to be as easy as the man assumed. There was a good chance this Jensen would not survive the shock. As soon as the lid cracked open he gathered the unconscious man into a bridal carry and headed for the hanger. "I've got it from here," he told the man.

"Remember my scotch," he called after him and he chuckled when Castiel's feathers fluffed in annoyance.

The Croatoan's med-bay was small, more of a large closet really, but it was well-stocked and far more capable than it may have appeared. Castiel made it to the ship in record time and he headed straight to the little med-bay. "Fire it up and get us out of here, Meg," he snapped as he hurried to the single treatment bed and strapped down the human.

"Ooh," Meg cooed as the Croatoan's engines roared and they vaulted past planetary orbit and headed straight for deep space. "He's pretty. He looks kind of familiar."

Castiel studied the slack features. "I do not believe his name is Jensen Ackles," he told her. Something had been nagging at him since he'd gotten his first glimpse of the human's face. He called up the diagnostic protocol, set it to trauma level 2, and then started the automated treatment cycle. A dossier, nothing more than a list of facts floated up from the depths of his memory, and with those facts came the knowledge that once there had been emotion attached them, though he could not recall what they had once been. "His name is Dean and up until his disappearance ten years ago he was heir to the Winchester throne on Outlaw," he stated.

The tiny optic Meg was using to watch the med-bay turned and focused tighter on the human's face. "Oh really. And how would you know that, Cassie," she teased.

He looked down at the unconscious man grimly. "I commanded the ship that destroyed the Impala. I believed there to be no survivors. Until today," he stated and then turned away, leaving the ship's AI to tend to Dean's injuries.

~+~

**Huntari System, Outlaw, Class H Planet**

There was a storm raging outside his window, giving voice to his discontent when he himself could not do so. The steady grating noise of the punishing sand scouring the exterior of the winter palace soothed him only because it reminded him of better times. His memory supplied to him a wealth of family moments, moments he would never see again. The days when the jarub, the summer storms of sand, battered at the palace doors had been his favorite as a child. Those were the days that his family would be able to be together, all of them at once. Now, with the jarub once again throwing its fury upon the summer palace, he both found joy in their remembrance and desolation at the reminder of what he'd lost. Sam turned in his bed, silk sheets sliding along his skin, so that he could check the time. The storm would rage for several hours yet, locking him behind its walls as effectively as a siege.

He felt Ruby stir next to him, supple limbs twining with his. He was so tired of this game they were playing. His people saw him as nothing more than a glorified stud, necessary to carry on the royal line and nothing more. As the last surviving member he had been caged like the rarest of birds while they paraded their feminine offerings before him, hoping he would finally plant his seed in one of them. He ruled from his gilded throne and Ruby was only the latest succulent to grace his bed.

"Sam, you must consider an alliance with the demon," Ruby insisted, dragging one manicured nail down his naked chest to disappear beneath the sheets. "Surely you can see the necessity."

Sam caught her wrist before it could move lower. "There is no proof that the Angels are coming back," he countered.

She slid the front of her body along his side and purred, "Your brother would have wanted his people safe." Just because Sam had avoided a coronation so far that did not mean he hadn't been shoe-horned into the role anyways. He was the last living Winchester. The Council wouldn't let him get out of ruling that easily.

He slid out of bed, extracting himself from Ruby's hands. He was less and less enamored with her as of late. "He would not have wanted this," he scoffed and he threw on his clothing. "You have no claim to me," he reminded her when she slid up against the back of him. Sam didn't know how much longer he could tolerate this existence.

False hurt contorted Ruby's face as she released him, but when he didn't grab for the bait, when he didn't try to comfort her, she spit out, "Don't come crying to me when this little kingdom of yours crashes down around your ears, boy king." The venom in her voice set him back. "Your brother is dead," she added just to twist the knife she thought she had in him.

Sam was unmoved. He wouldn't give her that power. "The Council may have chosen you as my consort, but they did not give you a seat at the table," he coldly informed her and finished donning the remainder of his clothing. "Don't presume I care to know what you with your limited experience thinks is relevant." He didn't bother to dress properly, even though he was wearing all the pieces. He left her suite with his shirt flapping around his torso, boots still in his hand and his enmity a slow simmer in his veins. The weighty monstrosity the Council called a crown only served as an effective cage for him, an attractive one but a cage nonetheless. He'd give it all up to erase the last ten years. He just had to figure out how.

Sam didn't return to the royal apartment. If he had his way the royal apartments would be wherever he decided to lay his head down for the night. His own rooms, the ones he'd grown to his manhood within, would have been more than sufficient for the task and far more desirable. Tradition, however, prevented their use. He'd been ushered into the overly large, disgustingly gilded rooms that every king had slept in for the last four hundred years. The same rooms that his parents had died in. The bed his brother had slept in two days before his death. Sam often found himself at Ruby's door, as empty as he felt at the end of the night, just to avoid the memories. Ruby's soft curves made her barely tolerable, but if his people thought he was busy in her bed every night, then they weren't wondering why he could never be found in his own, in the bed that had previously belonged to Dean and their father before him.

The walls he was walking past slowly changed from those of the expansive private chambers to those of the lower public floors. Sam had assumed he'd been wandering aimlessly while he was busy trying to tease out the mess that was his sex life, but his feet had known the way. The little chapel was empty, the crowds had stayed home. He entered slowly, eyes roving over the vibrant colors of the stained glass, the deep luscious green of the tapestries, the speckled cream and cocoa marble of the burial vault. Dean's empty tomb. There hadn't been enough of a body left to bury, nothing to identify. The explosion had been too big, too catastrophic and the Crowned Prince had been vaporized instantly in the inferno. Or so he'd been told. Sam still hadn't quite accepted the official story. He kept hoping that one of these days he was going to wake up and the last ten years had been nothing more than a terrible nightmare.

Sam had painstakingly guided the design of every inch of this monument to the Righteous Man. Dean had been a warrior, a General, but first and foremost he had been Sam's big brother. He had raised Sam. He was here so often that his knees fit into the depressions on the cushion before the vault like the foam had been molded to his specifications. He came here to think as often as he could manage with his busy schedule, needing to feel close to Dean. Sam reached out and put his hand on the warm marble wishing the speckles in the stone were the freckles on his brother's skin instead.

"Dean," he choked out, trying to keep the tears from falling. He was a horrible crier, always had been. Sam whispered into the summer air, "I miss you." Things were getting so fucked up. Dean would know what to do about the demon's offer, about the Angel threat lurking in the shadows. He looked up at the portrait of the two of them, taken to commemorate Dean's nineteenth birthday. "If you are out there somewhere, if you are alive at all, now would be a good time to come home."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lyrics taken from Way Down We Go by Kaleo.
> 
> I used the Star Trek fictional classification of planets...  
> *Class L Planet – marginally habitable, rocky and barren planet with an oxygen-argon atmosphere possessing a high carbon dioxide content, able to sustain limited plant life but generally has no animal life.  
> *Class Y planet – also known as a Demon Class planet and is hostile to all life. It has a toxic atmosphere that may or may not be irradiated, survival on the surface is unlikely without a proper support suit for any length of time  
> *Class H planet – hot and arid, robust oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere supporting drought resistant plant and animal life
> 
> I also borrowed some things from other authors, or I made them up....  
> *rostek – an extremely powerful painkiller that is mildly hallucinogenic and is inhaled in aerosol form, the average trip for a human under the influence of a single dose is seventeen hours, f'hoarg biology reduces the trip to around forty minutes, not addictive  
> *danha – a trained whore  
> *klah – restorative drink made from the bark of the Klah tree tasting of coffee and chocolate with a faint aftertaste of cinnamon, borrowed from Anne McCaffrey's fictional world of Pern  
> *izizop – Enochian for vessel or highest vessel, a human genetically compatible with the Nazp'sad process  
> *inoas – Enochian for become, the process by which an izizop is modified to suit the needs of a specific f'hoarg  
> *half-turn – one-half of a standard Earth year, estimated  
> *sibsi – covenant


	2. 2: The Psychopath Sitting Next to You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Meg rolled her eyes. “Sure, think about the human first,” she grumbled. She hauled him fully upright and slapped him on the shoulder as she left to find some bandages for the sealed cut in the back of his skull. “Who do you think tried to split your skull open? The thing’s feral,” she added.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry! It took me forever to come up with this chapter. The whole thing was already written, but I'd lost my motivation on this fic. Seems like I might have gotten a bit of it back. Again, sorry for the horribly horrendously momentously gargantuan wait for this update. Hopefully the next one will come a bit easier.

  _All my friends are heathens. Take it slow._  
Wait for them to ask you who you know.  
Please don’t make any sudden moves.  
You don’t know the half of the abuse.

~+~ 

**Croatoan, medbay**

Dean didn't wake easily or slowly. One moment he'd been astride the great hound, his arms wrapped around its thick neck while it careened through the prison only to skidded to stop alongside a dinky little runner class vessel that looked as if it should have been decommissioned decades ago. He had no idea how the beast had known where to go, or even what the sight of even this little rust bucket could do to Dean, but he wasn't going to question it too much. Hellhounds were known to be violent and dangerous, but he didn't believe this one had knowingly betrayed his trust. It would have sooner ripped out his throat and eaten him for dinner. It was why he so enjoyed their company. They were very straightforward creatures. The next moment, though, he was opening his eyes to the dim light of a ship’s compartment in transit, a low hum of the engines thrumming in the metal around him. The second thing he noticed was that his head was throbbing in time to the quick march of his heartbeat. It was hurting worse than any other part of him, which was saying something. The third thing he noticed was that the ear-splitting scream giving him that horrible pain in his skull was coming out of his own mouth. With that realization, he was able to do something about the noise level. His mouth clicked shut, teeth clacking. The sound abruptly cut off.

Dean didn't bother taking a look around. In his experience, one room was usually much like any other in the grand scheme of things. He had survived his time in hell by trusting his instincts, and, right now, his instincts were telling him that he was not safe. He hadn’t been safe anywhere in a long time. Dean didn't know why exactly his situation had changed so drastically, but he also didn't question it. First and foremost, he needed to get free of his bonds. He started tearing at the equipment with his hands, only vaguely recognizing the older model advanced-medibed as he roughly disconnected the various sensors and access ports attached his flesh. The alarms started screeching as soon as he ripped off the heart monitor and the sudden noise shattering the quiet sent him into a mad scramble for one corner of the room. He crouched low to the floor with his teeth bared, ignoring the sharp pain of his body telling him that he’d new ripped holes in his flesh in his haste to get free. Dean was bleeding. He could smell it, copper tinge sticking to his nose and crawling down his throat.

His mind was still muddled, still trying to make sense of his surroundings when he saw something he thought he wouldn't see ever again. That fucking pair of wings sent him hurtling into the past and all he could see was his men dying as the Impala groaned in distress and finally exploded around him.

~+~

Castiel was down the hall, dressed in a ratty pair of coveralls that had once been white. He spread his bare toes on the decking as he gave one final swipe to the bulkhead and stepped back to survey his handiwork. The brushed polymer surface gleamed in the ship’s overhead lighting, and he took a moment to admire the shine before he moved on to the next section. Much of the living space on the Croatoan had to be cleaned in a similar manner. Many aspects of daily life would be unrecognizable to a being born centuries prior. The advent of various inventions had altered the course of history irrevocably time and time again. The least of which had been interstellar flight.

One thing that hadn’t changed, though, was the simple act of cleaning. There were ships, mostly military, that boasted automated cleaning systems, but even then there could be found some poor soul assigned the task of scrubbing clean the inevitable spots the system missed. It seemed that the second half of the space age revolution had passed by the janitorial profession altogether, often leaving good ole elbow grease the most efficient choice. More often than not, he ended up doing it alone, as well. Meg had come up with an endless list of excuses for not pitching in over the years. He’d heard almost all of them at least twice by now. This time, Meg had declared there was an entire asteroid-worth of space dirt on her skin and promptly disappeared into the forward bath before he could utter a word of protest. Her weekly baths were the stuff of legends when he'd found her in that backwater station on the edges of f'hoarg territory all those years ago. That hadn't changed, but he couldn’t help wondering why she couldn’t have waited a few hours before her soak today.

Castiel pushed the bucket of scouring gel along the floor, moving down to the next dirty bulkhead panel. Its gray coloring was still dull beneath a month’s worth of grease and grime waiting to be removed. He started with the mop, dipping the plain fabric strands on the end of a long metal pole into the gel and then applying the solution with a little force. The mop was something that hadn’t changed much in the preceding centuries. He’d read somewhere that the handle had once been fashioned from the woody flesh of an old Earth tree and the fabric had been woven from something called cotton, a far cry from the extruded polymers used to make his current model.

Castiel grimaced as he put a bit more shoulder strength into working the sopping fibers over one particularly stubborn mystery stain. It was spattered over a good portion of the panel and so dark in color it could have been a bit of demon’s blood. The stuff was as pitch black as Meg's skin and notoriously sticky if allowed to dry. Come to think of it, the pattern in front of him closely matched a speckle of tar black dots on another bulkhead nearby. He was not looking forward to cleaning that off his ship’s walls, either. The only bright spot of this admittedly unpleasant task was that his ship was basically a squat tube. Croatoan was a bit wider than she was tall, but there was only the single continuous corridor running the length of the ship, with rooms peeling off on either side. There just wasn't that much of her to get dirty.

Castiel pondered their current dilemma as he worked, the subtle sounds of the ship soothing the ruffled edges of his mood as he worked. He had broken an inmate out of a supermax prison, one of only three that he knew existed. Sure, he’d done it before, but there had been a hefty profit margin to ease the churning worry in his gut. This time he had no intention of even flying within a day’s proximity of a Host ship and that meant he wouldn’t be able to pay off whatever officials came sniffing his way. He had enough credit left to keep them flying a little longer and that was about it. One big repair on his beloved ship or the next bribe he couldn’t weasel his way around would leave them adrift until their next job paid out. Yet, still, Castiel felt almost violent at the thought of selling the izizop in his med-bay to the Host.

He knew Meg was amused with their current predicament. After all, she was the one who had found Castiel's marker in the human's blood, his claim, and she’d been teasing him about it ever since. Castiel was certain that he and Dean had never crossed paths before, not even ten years before when he had the pleasure of escorting the f'hoarg diplomatic mission to the human’s home planet of Outlaw. He had spent the duration aboard his command... Hadn’t he? The harder Castiel pressed at those memories the more unsure he became of them, and yet he couldn't find a concrete reason to mistrust his own recollections. Everything he could recall matched the events he had recorded in his journal. It was all very puzzling.

Castiel chewed on his thoughts a bit more as he worked, the repetitive motion of scrubbing the bulkhead clean working deep into his psyche with every gleaming inch gained. He worked until something that felt like the psychic equivalent of putting nails to a chalkboard disturbed him, snapping him out of the quiet reverie he’d found in his task. A shockwave of savage emotion rolled into Castiel and clawed at his insides, a warning scraping at the seams of his skull before a bloodcurdling scream assaulted his ears and Castiel exploded into a flurry of activity, heading in the direction of the med-bay as fast as he could manage. His feet didn’t carry him to the water tub near the rear of the ship. Meg's vocal chords were simply not designed to achieve the frequencies that were currently threatening to burst his eardrums. When she got really pissed off, her voice would go lower and lower until it was nothing more than a bass roar just below the human range of hearing. It had shaken Croatoan right down to her bones the last time Meg had turned up the decibels just to spite him. No, this unholy racket had to be coming from the med-bay.

Castiel knew that once upon a time his species could do much more than sense ambient emotion. Nestlings were told fantastical tales of great shaman that could read another’s private thoughts, uncover the deepest of buried memories, and even bend the will to their command. Such talents had long been lost to the ravages of time, and never once had he mourned their passing. The f'hoarg wielded enough power, in his opinion, and often did so with a heavy hand. He was cursing his own vestigial empathic sense as a fresh wave of despair radiated out from somewhere else on the ship, making him stagger beneath the force of its intensity. His wings flared instinctively to catch his balance, every feather fluffed in alarm, before they snapped tight to his body, allowing him to pivot on his heels and begin a mad dash to the med-bay. In his haste, he dropped the mop handle onto his bent knee and even stubbed his toe on, well, nothing that he could see. The pain in his toe itself was proof enough that there indeed had been something strewn along his path, but he was hobbling along down the corridor, bare feet slapping on the metal grating, and in much too much of a hurry to stop and examine every inch of the blasted grating for the flaw.

He truly hadn’t seen anything sticking up out of the deck plating when he'd started to run. To make matters worse, he had badly bruised his left wing trying to get through the med-bay door as quickly as possible. The wrist joint was throbbing painfully in time with his heartbeat as he stood breathing heavily in the center of the little room, looking around him frantically for the human he knew he’d left slumbering a few short hours before. The room was deathly quiet. The screaming had cut off as soon as he’d burst through the doorway and the pounding waves fractured. It was the only warning Castiel got a split second before everything went black. Later, he woke with a deep groan rumbling in his chest and no idea how much time had passed. His complaining only served to make the pounding inside his skull even worse. He struggled to sit up, the world swimming a bit as he slitted his eyes open and then quickly slammed them shut against the brightness of the overhead lighting.

“Easy there, Clarence,” Meg clucked. Her hand was pressing on his chest, keeping his back firmly on the ruined medibed’s thin mattress.

He groaned and forced the lids of his eyes open. The pain in his head seemed to be pulsing in sync to the twinkling stars fading in and out of his vision. “Ugh. What happened,” he asked, not actually expecting an answer.

“You got beamed over the head, genius,” she answered with a chuckle and helped him to sit up using a hand between his shoulder blades for support.

Castiel’s wings made the maneuver a little awkward. When he had gotten halfway to sitting they started flapping on reflex and it took a bit of concentration to make his wayward appendages cooperate. “Is Dean alright,” he asked next.

Meg rolled her eyes. “Sure, think about the human first,” she grumbled. She hauled him fully upright and slapped him on the shoulder as she left to find some bandages for the sealed cut in the back of his skull. “Who do you think tried to split your skull open? The thing’s feral,” she added.

“But, where is he,” he urged as he looked around the small room. He twisted to get a good look behind him.

“I don’t know, alright,” she announced. She threw her hands up in the air dramatically. “I heard this loud crash. Which was your feathery ass executing a face-plant on the floor, I might add.” She paused to giggle at the memory before continuing. “When I got here, the room was empty except for one unconscious dumbass with a bleeding head wound and the medibed was royally fucked.” She gestured to the equipment in question. “Do you have any idea how much I paid for this beauty,” she muttered under her breath as her hands fluttered over the back of his skull, mapping the size of the cut before she started cleaning around it.

Castiel endured her ministrations and dutifully held the artificial skin patch in place while Meg fused the edges to his scalp. “Not near what it was worth, Meg,” he remarked in a matter-of-fact tone. “I can fix it with that case of spare parts in the hold.”

“There, good as new,” she remarked. “Try not to screw up my handiwork.”

Castiel prodded at the spot while she cleaned up. He stood gingerly, finding that the vertigo had passed.

“We can be at the gate in less than a day,” Meg observed.

His eyes snapped to her back. “No,” he replied, sounding surer of himself than he actually felt.

“What is so different about this one? I mean you looked at him like,” she broke off, at a loss for the words to describe what she had seen on his face when he’d carried the unconscious human onto Croatoan.

“I don’t know, ok. I just know that we can’t hand Dean over to the Host. We can’t let anything happen to him. He’s too important,” Castiel insisted.

Meg didn’t comment, though she gave him a weird look.

Ten minutes later the medibay was tidy and Castiel was looking around like he expected the human to coalesce out of the shadows.

The demon grabbed his arm and dragged him away. “Come on, feathers. I’ve got a few things to show you,” she explained.

~+~

Dean didn’t know why he’d hesitated. He didn’t know why the angel wasn’t bleeding out onto the decking, why he hadn’t bathed in f'hoarg intestines like he had wanted to. The reason was on the tip of his tongue, rolling around in his mouth and refusing to take form. He knew that something had reached inside and mucked about in his brain, steeped in red and howling. Dean shook, a shimmy that traveled the length of his body, as he refocused on the present. This would be so much easier with the crew disposed of, nothing left but salted jelly in the big empty. He had a planet to get back to, with forests full of trees as tall as the deep blue sky and endless fields of golden grass rippling in the breeze. He could almost smell the salt in the air. Dean had once been someone else. He didn’t remember much of before, but he did know that he had not always been like this. He had once had a home.

Dean slid his fingers over the flimsy resin panels of the wall. The rumble of the ship’s main drive against his skin was like a great beast rubbing its side affectionately along the skin of his palm, affectionate, bringing forth images the man didn’t even realize until now had been buried deep inside. They were glimpses of a life that could not have been and the last was truly horrific. He watched as the flesh melted from the pale white of Caleb’s skull in clumps of short-cropped brown hair and bubbling blood. Debris flickered in and out of focus, a picture changing channels, while nothing less than an inferno raged around them. Fear skittered its icy claws down his spine. Somewhere deep beneath the instincts urging him to run Dean was struggling to reconcile the horror still taking place in his mind and the cold smoothness he was so desperately pressing into his palms, his eyes open so wide that white was visible around the green of his irises. Closing them did him no good. It only shut out the peaceful little ship that he so desperately wanted to be real, even if it did look like a bucket of rusty bolts. So, he kept them open and for a moment he could have sworn he glimpsed Caleb’s broad back disappearing into the black. He hurried after, hoping to catch up to his friend but not entirely sure what would happen if he did.

~+~

Meg flopped into the copilot’s seat, trusting the aging frame to take her weight as she melted into the cushioning. "I have yet to determine why, but I believe the reconditioning protocol was dosing him with D-3Y1014," she told him. She stabbed a button and the display expanded to reveal the human lying on the medibed, looking more meat than alive.

Castiel stepped closer, wings rustling. "Now, why would it do that," he mused as she used the pad of her thumb to advance the recording to a few seconds before Castiel had burst into the room. Dean’s eyes on the recording suddenly popped open. Castiel jerked back in surprise, a denial on his lips. Those human eyes seemed to have been covered by a patchy black film, spots of green and pearly white showing through the filth.

She hissed, "Nasty. Too bad we don't have any. He's going to go downhill fast." Meg was trying to sound nonchalant, but Castiel could hear the undercurrent of regret in her voice. She cared even when she didn’t want her captain to know it.

"What do you know about it," he asked, curious.

Meg huffed and flipped a few switches. "I can't believe you left PAHCCy in charge while you were mopping," she complained, referring to the autopilot program that was nearly as old as the Croatoan herself. Meg's face scrunched up in disgust. "It screws up my settings every time. And you didn't even finish the bulkhead by the way. There's scouring gel all over the floor."

Castiel looked at the panels as she made numerous minor changes across the board. He had to admit with every change she made the ship's efficiency improved by clear margins. Seven percent overall since Croatoan’s last overhaul, by his latest estimate. "What can you tell me about D-3Y1014, Meg," he pressed. His wings rustled, causing feathers to brush against her chair. Castiel didn’t want to push the subject. He could tell she wanted to avoid the issue, but he needed to find out more.

She sighed, fingers pausing near one of the smaller displays, "My people call it rudhira jvara." Her tone was flat, features tinged with sadness. It was obvious that there was much more to the story he had yet to know.

"Fever blood," Castiel muttered. He settled into the other chair and pulled up the ship's internal database. "Where have I heard that name,” he wondered as he flipped through the filenames looking for something familiar. The silence was filled by the creak and groan of their seats and the background symphony of a ship in deep space. Meg was content to let him figure things out on his own until he turned to her and blurted out, "That man in Kephralgen. He mentioned getting a vial for you. I didn’t think much of it at the time. Why would he do that? Is it a hallucinogen?" Meg didn't normally indulge, but when she did she gravitated towards the psychedelics more than anything else.

She quirked an eye ridge at him. "It doesn’t do much for a demon, but I've seen a few humans on it. It's not pleasant," she said. She flipped through a few partitions in the computer's memory before selecting a video file. "Well, see for yourself." She gestured to the HUD and the video file enlarged before it started playing.

Castiel watched the news clip all the way through, trying not to flinch. The reporter didn’t mention the name of the drug the victim had been dosed with, but the results had been gruesome.

“One taste and they can’t live without it.” Her mouth set in a thin, angry line as she added, "Your star scientist manufactures it from the fluid found in a demon's nervous system."

He squinted as he tried to remember who that would be. "Raphael? I hardly think he would condone developing something so destructive," he remarked disbelievingly. The Lord Commander’s favorite healer was a ruthless skit of a thrakma, but he was exceedingly protective of the seraph under his watch. "You must be mistaken," he added, but he didn't sound as confident as he should have given how quickly he came to the conclusion. It sounded like a desperate denial. Castiel might be on the run from the Host, but he still doggedly clung to the childlike belief that the Guardians of his people could be nothing but essentially good.

"Oh, pretty bird, how naive you are," Meg scolded, but her tone was flat. "It's a performance drug… for the seraphim. Lucifer's shining achievement," she added.

Castiel sucked in a breath. Lucifer was dead. The vid of his execution over a hundred years ago had been widely distributed.

"I am not comfortable watching Dean die in such a way,” he insisted.

Meg watched confused as he stalked out the cockpit. He hadn't openly shown such concern for another being before. Not even her.

~+~

**Huntari System, Outlaw, Class H Planet**

"Again," Swordmaster Singer demanded.

Sam twirled his dagger in the air while he brought the rapier up into position. Dean had once favored the bastard sword, probably because their mother disliked the name. Its brutal fighting style had suited Sam's brother well. Sam, though, preferred finesse. He enjoyed the choreographed style created for his choice of weapons. He grinned, showing teeth stained pink with blood. "Getting tired, old man," he taunted.

"Hardly," his mentor grunted.

In reality, the sword had long become an obsolete weapon on the modern battlefield. They were no better than bringing a toothpick to a nuke fight. Winchester had kept the practice alive, though, and every generation of royalty learned to fight with at least one style of bladed weapon before adulthood, be it man or woman. Initially, Sam had resisted. He had the build of a fighter, tall and broad. Physically he was more than capable. His soul, though, was that of a scholar. He was competent with a variety of weapons, but where Dean seemed to become a breathtakingly beautiful extension of whatever weapon he wielded, Sam was merely technically flawless. Sam preferred to vanquish his enemies over a conference table, a much more devastating victory than slaughtering armies could ever hope to be alone.

Sam barely dodged his mentor’s blade, his concentration wandering. The practice session was drawing to a close. Singer may have gotten a good hit or two on him in the last hour, but Sam had been holding his own. There wasn’t much left for him to learn. These hours with the Swordmaster kept his skills polished and his mind sharp when the hours bent over legal documents would have dulled him. The older man was favoring his ribs on his dominant side, though, and his bum knee was beginning to act up, making his limp visible. The Prince was holding his own.

"Are you sure you don’t need a break," Sam prodded. He was doing his best to hide his wince when pain flared along his arm from a hilt check that had nearly disarmed him a moment ago as he circled, keeping the practice circle in between them. The bruise was already deep and filling with blood as time wore on.

Singer pointed with his own dagger. "You sure you can still use that arm," he asked, notes of concern coloring his tone. Swordmaster Singer had helped raise Sam and Dean after their mother had been murdered. King John had been functionally useless for years afterward.

Sam shrugged. "About as well as that knee of yours," he admitted.

They went through another series of exercises instead of continuing the sparring session. By the end of it, Sam was barely able to lift his arm and Singer was leaning on him heavily to spare his knee further soft-tissue damage for the day. "Let’s get you fixed up, kid," Singer announced, patting him on the shoulder. The man never seemed impressed at how Sam had grown from a scrawny teen to the towering figure he was now.

Together, they hobbled down to Sam’s personal doctor, always on call and available. Sam helped hoist the older man up onto a treatment bed before he pulled up a chair nearby to wait his turn. The blood was mostly superficial. There were a few shallow cuts that were quickly cleaned and sealed. Even Sam’s bruised arm got some attention, the burst capillaries repaired by an army of nanobots that also stuck around to mop up the spilled blood that was beginning to turn his flesh nearly black in color.

Singer spoke up while they were soaking in the hot tubs. "Summer’s almost over, boy. Have you made a decision," he inquired. He was trying to sound nonchalant, but Sam knew that the whole of Outlaw was balancing on a knife edge waiting for him to make up his mind.

"Twenty years and I still don’t know who killed Mom," he said. Singer opened his mouth to argue and Sam interrupted, "I know Rhodrick killed her, but he was a nobody. Someone ordered her death. Someone paid him a lot of credits to do it." He leaned back into the water with a sigh. "How do I know this demon Azazel wasn’t involved somehow? I don’t know why, but I don’t trust him," he explained. "Dean would have known what to do."

"Don’t sell yourself short, Sam. Dean was an incredible strategist in the field, but he didn’t have the patience for diplomacy," Singer told him. He was rubbing at his knee, fingers kneading the joint over and over to work the heat down deep. "You should take the Impala for a spin around the system tomorrow. Get out of this palace. It might be what you need to figure things out," he advised.

The royal engineers had broached the idea of rebuilding the Winchester flagship almost as soon as Dean’s state funeral had ended. It was only recently that Sam had been able to allow the project to move forward. Aside from the maiden voyage, he had not been on board her since. "Come with me," he asked, thinking it might be easier with his surrogate father by his side.

Singer took hold of his hand as he replied, "It’s not my place, son. You can’t duck the crown much longer and you’ll need to do this standing on your own two feet. You are more than capable of steering us proper, Sam. I can’t stand in your way." He looked apologetic as he said it, but Sam knew he would stand firm on his decision. There would be no convincing the man to change his mind.

Sam nodded, thinking that it was probably time. He’d take Impala out for a bit, make it a big public event for the people. They needed a strong leader now, had since his big brother’s death left the throne vacant. The last thing Sam wanted was the silver crown. He’d been content with a prince’s iron all his life, but Singer’s word rang true. The people needed some hope and Sam needed to grow a pair and give it to them. Hopefully, by the end of the trip, he would have a better idea of what he should do about the demon lurking out there in the big empty and currently robbing him of precious sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lyrics taken from Heathens by Twenty One Pilots.
> 
> *PAHCC – program for automatic helm and course correction  
> *rudhira jvara – fever blood in Sanskrit


	3. Simplicity, Multiplicity, Confusion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "It’s looking like the human’s best bet is to finish the process. What exactly does the whole 'becoming' thing entail? Cause I gotta say, your Deano there has a few days left at most and unless..."
> 
> "Meg," he interrupted and put down the syringe.
> 
> "...we get magically transported to Jun'gri Prime he's not going to make it."
> 
> "Meg"
> 
> "I say, what have we got to lose? And don't tell me you aren't interested. I mean how hard can it be..."
> 
> "Meg!," Castiel yelled, startling even himself with how loud that one word came out. His feathers fluffed sharply, revealing his agitation with the demon.
> 
> "Yes," she crooned.
> 
> "No," he said simply and picked up the syringe. He took a deep breath and let it out slow. There wasn't time to go through the entire vetting process. Even simulated, running all three trials would take most of the day and Dean needed a solution now. At least he was reasonably certain that it wouldn't kill the human. He inserted the thin metal tip into a surface vein and watched the biosensors for any changes as he pushed the plunger home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so happy that I managed to finish this chapter. It has greatly worried me that I have been unable to write anything decent for the last six months. I have been sick, the sort of sick you can't shake that leaves you with absolutely no ability to concentrate. Thus, no writing. But, when I banged out that timestamp for another fic in less than a day I just had to see if I could handle finishing this chapter. And, I did! I'm so happy right now!

_ And I feel like a stranger  
In the world I'm living in _

_ But I'm walkin' and wonderin'  
And my poor feet don't ever stop _

_ Seein' my reflection  
I'm hung over, hung down, hung up! _

~+~

**LOR-0085371, unnamed, Class J Planet**

The Seat of Power used to be such a cold monstrosity made of technology and mysticism. Its hull had been a pure brilliant white with smooth lines and swooping curves. It had been beautiful in its majesty, untouchable and terrible. These days, the ship could be found nestled in the embrace of a swirling gas giant known to its occupants only as Planet Seven. Seat of Power was showing her age a bit. The once white paint was now scratched and scarred. There were even places the paint was now dulled to a patchy grey, the surface so marred after multiple efforts to bend the dents out of the hull that the grit floating in the gas giant's upper atmosphere easily clung to the surface and was not so easily scrubbed clean.

Planet Seven traveled the seventh planetary orbit around an A6V star designated LOR-0085371 by the f'hoarg cartographers, its original name having been long lost to the ravages of time and changing technology. To any other species the atmosphere of their temporary home would be devastatingly toxic, most likely instantly fatal at minuscule doses. The f'hoarg's robust tolerances allowed them to survive hidden in the shadow of this deadly planet, even if he could always taste it on his tongue. Mikhiel squeezed out a few large spheres of his drink and caught them in his mouth before they could float too far. He wrinkled his nose at the sharp sour aftertaste tickling the back of his throat with each swallow. The floor to ceiling screens installed along the longest wall in the room gave the illusion of windows with a softly golden light streaming through. If he bothered to turn his head and look her would find a flawless representation of the Khyber mountain range on their home world, as beautiful as he remembered.

The gases outside were heavy enough that they were constantly leaving a sticky residue on suits and equipment taken off ship for any length of time. The purification systems at the exterior hatches did a superb job at removing the gunk, but every once in a while a speck or two would remain regardless and the entire environmental scrubber array would become contaminated as a result. By the taste, he could tell that its was due for a thorough washing down. That little daily annoyance was just one more reason why he hated this place. It was shame that he was beginning to hate the ship as well. She had been a steadfast machine and there was still a measure of loveliness hiding beneath the neglect.

"Eminence," a young one called out as she approached. She looked to be no more than twelve or fifteen cycles with shimmering rosy skin, long fuschia strands growing from her head and a pair of undersized wings covered in feathers of a deep maroon color fluttering behind her. The soft soles of her hidebound slippers scuffed along the stone surface with a ‘pat’ that echoed gently in the large room, sturdier footwear being unnecessary in the residence.

The musical quality of the fledgling's voice pulled Mikhiel abruptly from his dark thoughts and he tried to match a name with her distinctive coloring. Not many intact mated pairs had followed him into exile and, of those, only a few were still of breeding age. Fledgeling's had become a rare sight, a scant handful of pupil to fill the vast space of the training center.

The young one skidded to a stop and just managed to narrowly miss a full-speed collision with the large male that had been standing attention just inside the door. The deep blue hue of his simple garb identified him as a member of the palace guard. The entire contingent charged with the safety of the High Commander had followed him into exile and continued to perform that duty. His Host conditioning was evident in the way he stood, the way his eyes swept the room on a constant vigil, and the way he caught the fledgeling in a firm hold before she could trespass further. "State your business," he demanded coolly.

The young one squirmed and he automatically adjusted his grip so as not to hurt her. He didn't let her go, though. "State your business," he firmly repeated.

The sharp edges of the data chip bit into the flesh of her hand as she clutched it even harder. It was a small shard-like object, small enough to easily conceal in her young fist, and made of a material that proved to be both delicate and resilient. It bent easily in her grasp but would snap back into shape as soon as she let up on the pressure. Right now, she knew she was crumpling the data chip, but she just couldn't help it. Advisor Haniel’s instructions had been very specific, for the High Commander's eyes only.

She squirmed again, wriggling.

Mikhiel sighed and his voice, though soft, carried over the sounds of the scuffle, "Nuriel." He beckoned with one hand after the pair had ceased struggling against each other and added, "Release the fledgeling. I hardly think she's an agent of the Garden come to slay me."

The guard she could now identify as Nuriel set her back on her feet and straightened to his full height. His voice was deep as he acknowledged, "Eminence." He didn't wait for a response. It wasn't needed. He returned to his post by the doorway as soundlessly as he had left it.

The young one's eyes were wide and round as saucers, but it wasn't with fear. It was with a little bit of pride and a whole lot of wonder. Her history lessons had taught her that the vessel she lived on her whole life had served as the Seat of Power since the dawning of this age. She wasn't able to wrap her mind around exactly how long 'this age' had been around, but it had to mean the vessel was old, like maybe as old as her azia's azia's azia.

Mikhiel switched his attention to her and smiled, hoping the expression made him a little less intimidating. "Come here, sister," he instructed, trying to remember how his caretakers had spoken to him when he'd been that young. "What do you have from the Spider for me today," he asked.

The fledgeling looked uncertain, gaze flitting back to the guard to make sure that the male hadn't moved. "Eminence," she repeated, holding the data chip out to him like a shield as she cautiously approached.

He smiled when she placed the little glimmering golden data chip in his hand and replied, "Thank you, little one." He silently thanked Father for the unusual interruption. He had been wallowing as of late, dwelling on what he had lost. He had needed a reminder, needed to remember what had driven him out to the reaches so far away from home. A fledgeling. More precious than mithril, than a title, than his own petty pride. Fledgelings had been his breaking point. Not a single young one on this ship would suffer the nazp'sad. Not as long as he drew breath.

He caught the spark of curiosity in her eyes as he plugged the data chip into a port on the table in front of him. The table's digital display came to life, a graphic representation of the data chip steadily blinking in the nearest corner.

Mikhiel patted the cushioned seat of the chair next to him. "Come, sit," he said.

He was pleased when she didn't hesitate. She sat down next to him in the entirely too posh furniture, taking him at his word. It was something he adored about the youth. Not his status, his royal title, or even his lofty accomplishments kept her from treating him like any other grown f'hoarg. Her presence was refreshing. He held a box in front of her, filled with bit-sized sweets, and asked, "Have you ever tried candy?" The last agent to venture out of the system had brought the box back with her upon her return.

The fledgeling shook her head. "No, Eminence," she replied.

He had suspected as such. "It is a human food, made from glucose or sucrose," Mikhiel told her.

She looked down at the box, eyeing the colorful contents dubiously.

He gently shook the box. "Just try one. I think you'll like it," he said.

The icon expanded into a holographic interface hovering in the space above the table, obviously finished examining the contents of the data chip for harmful code.

The fledgeling's hand darted out and chose a bright lime green piece of candy. He waited as she popped it into her mouth, wanting to see her reaction to the unaccustomed sweetness. Her eyes widened with delight as the flavor spread over her tongue, exploding inside of her mouth.

Mikhiel smiled encouragingly and set the box down between them. tapped the icon once and a video began to play next to a scrolling box of text. It seemed that more and more of the nenni pairs were perishing. He mourned for the f'hoarg and human lives lost. He had argued against the nazp'sad implants when his brother had first presented them. He didn't feel vindicated. He felt sick. "The time to come out of exile looks to be nearing," he said with a heavy heart. Too many had died already and things would get much worse before it could get any better.

She looked over at the display, curious, and he finally remembered. Ah yes, Abbriel was her name. The instructors had spoken highly of her at last month's briefing. They had highlighted her intelligence and resourcefulness.

He had a wild idea. "I need an assistant," he mused, his eyes fixed on the hologram. He looked over at her, one eyebrow raised in question, "Would you be interested?"

~+~

**Croatoan**

Dean followed the phantom into the cargo bay, neat stacks of ‘clast boxes carefully arranged along one wall. Their quality was clear, good sturdy containers meant to protect things of much greater value than their worth. They were the sort of thing to be found on cargo barges that traveled the long haul out to the reaches. Dean had been convinced the angel had been nothing more than an stress-induced hallucination. Yet, this small ship was looking less and less like a construct of The Pit.

"Sir! This way, sir!"

He spun around, expecting to find Caleb standing behind him, urging him on to the escape shuttle. He could almost feel the heat of the flames that were filling his memory, yellow tongues licking along the bulkhead. He was left wide-eyed and blinking in the now bright lighting overhead, almost blinding, as the apparition faded. He was left squinting against the glare of his new reality. A ship he did not know the name for. A future he could not even begin to guess.

"Caleb," he hissed.

He really needed to get out of here. Right now would be best.

Dean backed up into a corner of the cargo bay. It seemed a bit less illuminated than the rest due to the looming stack of boxes in the way of the lights. The rough edges of the bulkhead welding scraped against the exposed skin of his back, a delicious slide of little pain that helped to ground him, as he did his best to melt into the sliver of shadow offered. The darkness was comforting. He'd spent so long in the weak light of the prison that his eyes were having trouble adjusting and he was getting a headache.

He spoke to the quiet, "I'm not leaving without you," like he was trying to relive it, to fix it.

There was a sick twisted feeling in his gut that was only intensifying. It had happened. The Impala shredded to so much rubble. Caleb hadn't made it off the ship in time. And, neither had Dean. He knew that. He remembered finding the hatch closed, the shuttle's hull torn and looking like the edges could flutter in a passing breeze. There was no way he could have survived that.

"How long have I been dead?"

No answer was forthcoming.

Dean huffed and grumbled, "Figures."

His complaint was answered by a loud gurgling growl. The sound was so close and so loud that he startled violently, jerking backwards into a stack of clast boxes that subsequently crashed to the floor in a scatter. Dean tried not to think about the shape of the thing that had come for him in that little med-bay. He really did, but he was feeling like he was being tracked in this unfamiliar place, hunted. He tried to remember what 'here' was. Here, there were no guards to placate, no fellow prisoners to wake him at all hours of the night, and no hellhounds to keep him company.

Here there were bright lights and a silence so profound that it drowned out everything else. He was used to the clamor of a full prison; the sound of a hundred men or more dwelling in a single room seemingly designed to amplify the noise, the sticky hinges on his cell door that squealed in protest when he closed himself inside at night, the blast of the guard's siren, the howling of the hounds let loose for a meal, the metal on metal clang of every moving piece in the whole damned place. He was used to a veritable cacophony. The steady sound of this little ship's engine was simply too soft to compensate, too meek, and the stillness was unnerving.

Sitting there, crouched by the fallen boxes, Dean tried to think of anything other than the hell he'd come from and the hell he was sure was waiting for him. He tried to remember how things had been before, before he had woken in this diminutive vessel, before The Pit, before his death, and he came up short. It wasn't that his memory was blank. It was that his past was more fuzz than memory and the more his picked at it, the less solid it became.

His thoughts kept returning to the medbay and those wings. He had seen wings of a blue so dark they'd almost been black. He'd seen an Angel. There was only one species he knew of that boasted appendages so closely resembling the wings of a terran avian. It was the most terrifying thing he'd seen in a long time. Even more terrifying was the possibility that he might never see that particular set of wings ever again.

At the other end of the ship, Megla sighed heavily when she found her captain pacing the cockpit, his eyes glued to the display. A dozen feeds from all over Croatoan filled the HUD, even obscuring his view of space outside the hull as the display cycled through every single lens before starting over again. He cursed soundly in Enochian, the words sounding like he was spitting them more than saying them as they flew from his lips.

"Relax, Feathers," Meg urged. She was standing in the doorway, one hip leaning on the open hatch and her arms crossed over her chest. "I've got FRANK tracking him," she added.

Castiel kept his attention on the images flashing by. "I don't know a Frank," he stated.

"You know that sweet little bit of code I wrote to get rid of that wovil infestation during last cycle," she prompted.

He hummed, not even paying attention to what she was saying.

Meg narrowed her eyes, studying the almost frantic way that he searched the security feeds. She'd seen him do this before, this single-minded pursuit of prey to the exclusion of everything else. She wasn't going to get much out of him until his precious human was found.  Recognizing a lost cause, she raised her voice and said, "FRANK, isolate target Dean."

The pictures faded one by one, leaving a single frame that enlarged to fill the HUD until he could clearly make out the cargo bay. All it took was for him to glimpse a pale arm lying still on the decking on the left-hand edge of the screen and Castiel was in motion. He didn't even wait for Meg as she hurried after him, calling his name, and he knew she was trying to tell him to slow down and think this through.

Hours later, Castiel was hunched over the medibed controls, squinting at the readout with just as much intensity as he'd been scrutinizing the security feeds earlier. He’d been at it for hours and all he had managed to accomplish was a reliable way to keep the ever more increasingly unstable human unconscious. He had expected the man’s capture to be a bit more eventful than it was. Castiel had loaded a hypo with enough tranq to down a man three times Dean’s size and ventured out, only to discover Dean seizing in the cargo bay. He'd managed to calm the seizures, with the right cocktail of chemicals and a stabilizing force of nanobots. The human's vital's, though, continued to fluctuate wildly. His blood pressure had risen so high at one point that Castiel had been mildly surprised that he hadn't developed an aneurysm and died from the blood loss. The monitors were calm now. It seemed his latest chemical adjustments had at least some effect.

Castiel sighed as he pinched the bridge of his nose.

"Yo, how's the mud monkey," Meg asked rather loudly.

Castiel startled, bumping one wing on the wall behind him. "Ow," he grumbled. He looked up at the security cam, scowled, and returned to his work. "Is there a reason you are bothering me," he inquired as he selected yet another possible antidote for Dean's withdrawal symptoms and plugged its molecular formula into the biomed sim program. None of his previous choices seemed to do any good in the trial simulations and each failure left him even more unsure of his next course of action. Stabilizing the human wasn't going to save his life in the long run, or his mind.

Her disembodied voice was slightly softer this time. "Soooo," she began. "I was thinking." Her voice was slightly tinny over the speaker. She must have moved away from the mic.

Castiel snorted.

"Shut it," Meg warned and then she continued the one-sided conversation with barely a hitch. "The nearest safe medifacility is like three days away."

The biomed program chimed, indicating the simulation had completed phase one trials. He reviewed the results with elation and quickly drew up a dose into a glass syringe, an old Earth device he had found useful in emergencies like this one where half his supplies had been trashed and he was days away from resupply. "Your point," he prompted. He knew where this was headed.

"It’s looking like the human’s best bet is to finish the process. What exactly does the whole 'becoming' thing entail? Cause I gotta say, your Deano there has a few days left at most and unless..."

"Meg," he interrupted and put down the syringe.

"...we get magically transported to Jun'gri Prime he's not going to make it."

"Meg"

"I say, what have we got to lose? And don't tell me you aren't interested. I mean how hard can it be..."

"Meg!," Castiel yelled, startling even himself with how loud that one word came out. His feathers fluffed sharply, revealing his agitation with the demon.

"Yes," she crooned.

"No," he said simply and picked up the syringe. He took a deep breath and let it out slow. There wasn't time to go through the entire vetting process. Even simulated, running all three trials would take most of the day and Dean needed a solution now. At least he was reasonably certain that it wouldn't kill the human. He inserted the thin metal tip into a surface vein and watched the biosensors for any changes as he pushed the plunger home.

"Why do you want to save this human," she asked after a few minutes.

Castiel tidied up and sat down on the stool next to the bed. "I don't know," he admitted. Now all he could do was wait and see if the compound had helped.

Hours later, after she'd tired of watching her Captain fret over someone he'd professed to have never met before, Meg returned to the cockpit. She sat back in the pilot's seat and flipped through the starcharts as she pondered their situation. Absently, she pulled up the infomap for random systems, scrolling past the market data to reach the techspecs. She tapped a finger on the side of her boot where it rested by her knee. She didn't know what she was looking for, but she knew she had to do something.

~+~

**Huntari System, Planet Outlaw, Class H Planet**

The connection was spotty and tinted blue due to the nature of the equipment Zachariah was using. It was an unauthorized transmitter that he needed to use to make an unauthorized call. Anything he could do to improve the picture would have also compromised the transmission's ability to remain undetected by the technical security forces combing the servers looking for the mole, looking for him. "Please repeat," he hissed. They needed to hurry this up or he'd get found, and likely executed as a spy.

"Dean Winchester has been lost," his handler repeated.

Zachariah was dumbfounded. After the first near escape from a traditional facility, he had made sure the prince was sent to a cryo prison under a false name. He had been confident that the plan would be foolproof. "That's what I thought you said," he huffed and pinched the bridge of his nose. How had an unconscious man escaped from the most secure facility this side of the galaxy? "When did it happen," he demanded.

"The prison administrator confirmed that his pod was disconnected from central power three cycles ago. Preparations have been made. You must move now, before news of the Crowned Prince's survival reaches Outlaw," she told him.

"I need more time. The brother is resisting my guidance," he explained. Three days. The mud monkey had been free for three days and he was just now hearing about it.

"If you require assistance, I can submit a request for an additional operative," she offered.

It was a dangerous question. If he accepted the help, then he would essentially be admitting weakness. He would be telling his superiors that one simple human boy proved too difficult for him to manage on his own. He wouldn't last long once he returned home after that. But, if he didn't take her offer and he failed, then he would be labeled incompetent. He might even find a jail sentence as his homecoming, followed by a swift execution once public attention wandered elsewhere. "No. I will simply have to step it up," he replied. "Do you have a fix on the prince's location?" He had decided to gamble that he would be good enough to pull this off. He had to be.

She shook her head. "Negative. A full operational report has been requested by the overwatch committee assigned to investigate the incident. Please remit by end of cycle through the usual channel," she said.

Zachariah rolled his eyes at her overly formal language. "Understood," he finally said instead of voicing his ire over the entire situation. If they had let him kill the Crowned Prince when he'd survived yet another assassination attempt instead of putting the human on ice this would not have become a problem.

"In Father we trust," she intoned before the connection winked out.

"In Father we trust," he mumbled sarcastically as he began the lengthy process of covering his digital footprints so that the path could be used again.

Zachariah caught up with Ruby near the kitchens. "Is he ready," he demanded, dragging her into the shadows. She'd been working for him since the beginning. Getting her into the palace had been easy. She'd made it easy. The female was cunning.

Ruby shook his hand off of her arm and glared at him. "Almost," she declared. "I need a few more weeks. He's still hung up on the dead brother. It's cute really."

"We've run out of time," he informed the demon. "Dean is in play."

She smiled. "Not my problem, Zach. The deal was, you get rid of the older brother and I get to have some fun with the boy until Lucifer claims him," she brightly explained. When his face went about as red as a cherry tom, she added, "Remember, demons never lie."

Zachariah's mouth snapped shut, cutting off whatever scathing comment he had been about to make. She was right. They could twist the truth up into a pretzel so convoluted that not even the people involved could recognize it, but demons were terrible liars and as a rule just didn't even try it. "You have a week at most," he spat instead.

Ruby's hand landed gently on his ribcage and moved downward. "You look a bit stressed," she observed, her grin widening when he tensed up even more.

He grabbed her hand and forced it away from her body. "It could kill you," he said darkly, "And me."

"What can I say? I like to live dangerously," Ruby stated with a shrug, seemingly indifferent either way.

He straightened his clothing, primping the cravat around his throat. "You have seven days, whore," he repeated. "Get him ready."

She watched him storm off and pursed her lips, thinking that it might be the time to start slipping the stuff into Sam's drink if he kept refusing to take it voluntarily.

~+~

**Croatoan**

Castiel's stomach cramped, feeling hollow, reminding him that he hadn't eaten since second shift. He looked up at the time display on the medibed's readout. Ugh. It was now late first shift. He'd missed two meals and he could already feel a headache on the horizon. His wings expanded as best they could in the small room as he stood from the stool, stretching the cramped muscles that wrapped around the delicate hollow bones. He repeated the gesture with his arms and then he pulled his shoulders back to lengthen the muscles all along his spine. Just about every inch of him was complaining about the long hours hunched over.

As if on cue, Meg wandered in carrying a steaming cup of klah.

He noticed that she was moving a little stiffly as she leaned her hip against the doorway, trying to appear casual and only marginally failing. Castiel only noticed because of the years the two of them had spent together in close quarters. Deciding to let the demon lead, Castiel initially ignored her, choosing to busy himself returning the smaller equipment to storage.

"I never did understand just what they're used for," she said.

"What," Castiel asked, not picking up on the subject of the conversation.

Meg nodded towards the medibed. "The meat puppets," she clarified.

"The nenni is a sacred bond," he snapped, and then quickly regretted his tone. She didn't deserve it. Castiel was actually rather upset with himself, with his own failings over the years. He hadn't exactly been a strong supporter of nenni. What he was seeing now, well, it looked like someone had tried to twist it to some other purpose. It made him realize that he didn't abhor the practice as much as his younger self would have liked to believe.

Meg snorted. "I doubt the Host is buying convicts at 4000 credits apiece just for some fancy bond thingy," she remarked.

Castiel hadn't thought about it like that before. "You are probably right," he admitted, suddenly feeling sick. D-3Y1014. He'd assumed the humans the Host had purchased were being erased, like a data chip, but perhaps they were being tortured into submission. He felt like a fool. "D-3Y1014 seems to be designed purely as an instrument of torture. It doesn't appear to have any other human or f'hoarg application. Paranoia, hallucinations, suggestibility, agitation, confusion, seizures, psychosis," he said, his voice trailing off on the last word. He was at a loss to make any sense out of what he was seeing.

"You've heard the rumors, Clarence. Same as me," she pointed out. Meg set her cup down on the nearest table and approached the medibed. "What is going on with you? You haven't had questions before."

"I don't know," he answered honestly. He had doubts before this. He chose to ignore them, choosing not to trouble himself with little things. What happened after he got his credits hadn't been all that interesting. At least, that's what he kept telling himself.

"So, this one's not for the Host," she stated.

Castiel bristled at the thought of letting Dean out of his sight, dark feathers fluffing in agitation. "Your assumption is accurate, Meg," he muttered. It was uncomfortable, caring for another living being. He looked again at the display, noting that only a few minutes had passed since he'd last checked. Some how he knew that if the human male had been awake, Dean would be calling him a mother hen for all the hovering he was currently doing. "What's a hen," he suddenly asked.

Meg didn't attempt to answer him. She steped close and placed a hand on his upper arm, nails curving dangerously close to his skin. "C'mon," she urged, "you need to eat. Maybe get some rest too." She didn't let on that she was seriously doubting his sanity at the moment, but they both knew what was going through her mind.

Castiel didn't budge, his stance as immovable as if he'd been welded to the decking. "I have sufficient internal stores," he told her. Dean's vitals had climbed worryingly high in almost all respects, but they were steady now and much closer to normal. It was something, but he was no closer to saving the human from the ravages done to his system than when he'd begun. Castiel reached out to check the big pulse beneath a stubbly chin just to convince himself that the medibed’s sensors were still functioning properly, that the steady peaks and valleys of the cardiac monitor weren't a false read.

"It's been hours. You're exhausted. The mud-monkey looks better than you do," she added.

She probably had something in the galley to tempt his palate. "After the scan has completed," he told her. He wasn't hungry.

Meg released his arm and stubbornly stuck her entire head into his line of sight, obscuring both the medibed's tiny readout and Dean lying nearly motionless beyond. "You owe me, feathers," she said, her face set into an expression he'd seen before. She wasn't likely to give this up.

Castiel nodded. He did owe her. "Alright," he relented. Just a little while, he promised himself.

It was that moment, that resigned tone in his voice, that let her know he'd go with her. He'd eat whatever she set in front of him. Castiel never lied to her. "Awesome," she announced and hip-checked him aside so she could access the controls, not giving him a chance to back out.

He could see over her shoulder well enough to tell that she was calibrating the automatic program and setting it to run. Regardless, he felt compelled to resist one last time as she latched onto him and started tugging him out of the room. "Can we do this later? I really need to keep working on the antidote," he protested, even as he obediently followed after the tug of her hand on his. He gave the medibay one last desperate look before they were heading down the corridor.

All too soon they were turning into the tiny ship's galley. The lights seemed harsh reflecting off the light grey bulkhead and matching table with chairs. The yellow bowl and the greenish goop it held were the only bright spots of color in an otherwise drab alcove. The food, though, smelled delicious despite its decidedly less than tantalizing appearance. It had the consistency of snot, if snot could be lumpy and gritty at the same time, and it didn't look familiar. He watched it glop down from the spork and wondered if this was something Meg had picked up on Kova'R. She had spent quite some time on the market deck.

Castiel shrugged, then dug in. Calories were calories. The explosion of rich savory flavor as he chewed was a pleasant surprise.

Meg hid her smirk by turning away to dish up something purple and tan and green for herself. "You look like a duqusalynx munching on a choert egg," she teased.

He hummed with his mouth full, swallowed, and scooped another bite into his mouth. He took note of the careful way she was moving and the wince she tried to hide as she was forced to bend to sit down opposite him. Dean had gotten in a few well-placed kicks before he'd gotten the seizures under control. The point of his bare toes had dug in to a tender spot along the demon's spine and its was apparent that she was still feeling the ache of the abused tissues.

"I set course for the Il Lhum while you were playing with your human," she remarked, oblivious to his thoughts as she worked through her own dinner.

"Il Lhum," he asked. At first he didn't understand why she would risk it. The Il Lhum contracted the Host for system security near their settlements.

"He's too far gone for a deep space chopshop to do him any good, Clarence. He needs an alchemist," Meg told him in between bites. "And, I need the little bastard to wake up and tell us why you're so eisheth enamoured with him," she added with a wink.

Castiel's mind instantly began to calculate the odds of being intercepted by a Host cruiser.

Meg cleared his bowl, dropped it into the sink, and secured everything else she had pulled from the larder during their meals' preparation. When she turned back around, her captain still had that faraway look of someone lost in his own head.

"How long until we leave the reaches," he suddenly asked, referring to the regions of this galaxy that lacked both affluence and heavy boat traffic. He blinked and turning those electric blue eyes on Meg.

"Relax, bird-brain. We've got ten hours until we get within scanning range of the patrols," she told him. "You need to get some rest, but, before you do, I think I've torn a muscle in my back. Can you maybe..."

Ten minutes later Meg was stretched out face down on the table. "Oh, right there, right there," She moaned obscenely. The contours of her back arched up to his hands as his nimble fingers dug into muscles on either side of her spine, kneading the knots away with practiced ease.

Castiel bent over her, using his weight to apply consistent pressure to just the right spots. They'd done this before, when the stress of sitting too long in the cockpit got to her muscles. Diagrams of demon musculoskeletal anatomy even populated a folder in his private partition, downloaded after he'd realized he didn't know enough about the lay of the muscles but he hadn't wanted to admit to it.

Her tension was slowly melting away. "He's lucky you like him, bird-brain," she husked. She shifted, turning her face from one side to the other. "I think my bruises have bruises," she complained.

He chuckled, looking down at the ebony skin. If she had any bruising, there was no way for him to tell short of performing a targeted surface scan in the medibay. "You'll heal," he remarked as he viciously dug his thumb into a particularly stubborn cluster of knotted muscle along her left shoulder blade. Nothing was broken. "Besides, the Il Lhum will gladly patch you up when we arrive," he added.

"Careful," Meg whined, her back once again curving into the pressure as the knots gave way with an almost audible pop. She startled, yelping. "It's been too long," she mumbled as she returned to laying boneless on the tabletop like a puddle of demon. "Mmm. No healers. I'm good," she assured him.

Castiel felt the last of the tightness in her back dissipate. He eased up on the pressure, switching to the final stage of the massage. He finished with long, slow strokes up and down her spine to gently coax her muscles to lengthen and lay flat. It had a similar purpose to the cool down phase of most exercise regimens.

"Wake me up when we get there," she told him as her eyes closed. She didn't stir when he covered her body with a light blanket. She didn't even notice when he picked her up into his arms and carried her down the corridor to her quarters. The demon would doze like that for an hour or two, limp and looking quite adorable.

He settled her onto the hard sleeping pallet and left. The door to her quarters slid closed soundlessly behind him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The lyrics are from "Mixed Up Confusion" by Bob Dylan. So, I promise that, in the next chapter, Dean will wake up and actually be something more than 'the sick guy'. Promise. I have an additional 10k words written. I just have to edit and reorder it.
> 
> *A6V star - a blue dwarf star using the Harvard spectral classification scheme and the Morgan-Keenan luminosity class (MKK)  
> *Class J Planet - a gas giant according to the fictional planetary classification system outlined in the Star Trek universe
> 
> *mithril - mythical metal that is both stronger and lighter than steel, first decsribed by JRR Tolkien  
> *nazp'sad - Enochian word meaning 'sword'  
> *azia - mother, derived from the Enochian word 'aziazor' meaning love  
> *nenni - Enochian word for 'you have become'  
> *first of the cycle - aka morning  
> *eisheth - demon curse word, the given name of a Jewish demon 'Eisheth Zenium' who eats the souls of the damned  
> *reaches - The sparsely settled regions of the galaxy. They tend to be poor in both credits and education, and there is significantly less commercial traffic and the accompanying security patrols than in more densely settled, affluent systems.


End file.
